there’s III sides to every story

if I was Dumbledore I would've hid the philosopher's stone in the aws console

Hard to imagine a worse feeling than realising you had got something indisputably wrong about Piers Morgan in a book

is opus 5.5 still a sanctimonious prick?

most of the pisa stuff on here is lazy or agenda-driven. the more useful debate is what scottish education has been optimising for, what we gained, what we lost, and whether we can keep the real gains while developing more depth.

New YouGov poll out. Pretty damn clear what the public thinks on this one.

haven’t we done well 😔

Granton deserves a tram. The question is how? Option A: Roseburn Path – an old railway line, shut down decades ago, but approved for tram use 20 years ago. Option B: Orchard Brae – 80% more expensive, 8 minutes slower, and will take longer to build. The solution is clear. Now it’s time to approve it. Next Thursday, Edinburgh councillors must APPROVE Option A. Tell them.

For six months, Google Maps sent a slice of drivers in ten American cities down deliberately slower routes. About 30 seconds slower on average, and under 2% of trips were touched. The experiment ran on roughly 100 of the most congested road segments in each city, switching on and off day by day so each city acted as its own control. The results are out now in Nature Cities, from Google Research with collaborators at Berkeley and Stanford. The reasoning behind it is old and slightly counterintuitive. Every navigation app does the same thing: it finds you the fastest route right now, for you alone. When millions of phones do that at once they all pour onto the same handful of arteries, and those arteries stop being fast. Transport economists have been writing about the gap between what's good for one driver and what's good for the network since the 1950s. Nobody had tested a fix at city scale with real drivers, because you'd need to steer routing for a large share of a city's traffic, and about three companies on Earth are in that position. So Google put a penalty on the worst segments during their worst hours, which nudged the routing engine towards alternatives of similar road class and comparable travel time, then measured what happened across the whole network on weekdays between 7am and 8pm. On the targeted segments, traffic moved roughly 2% faster in the median city. Los Angeles got 4.56%, Atlanta 3.30%. Fuel burn on those stretches dropped between 0.5% and 1%. Across every road that saw a change in traffic, which covers around 80% of each city's driving, speeds rose 0.35%, reaching 0.5% during the morning and evening peaks. Total travel time on affected trips fell 0.69%. Their Bayesian model put the probability that the speed effect was genuinely positive at 99.8%. That adds up to more than 1,000 tonnes of CO2-equivalent saved per year, per city, in most of the places studied. Cars and vans account for around 10% of global carbon emissions, and the average driver spends about 2.6 years of their life behind the wheel, so a fraction of a percent across an entire road network is a serious amount of fuel. Per driver, the saving comes to about 0.25% of an average journey, roughly one fortieth of the normal day-to-day wobble in how long the same commute takes. Nobody in those ten cities noticed anything, in either direction, including the people sent the long way round. The authors are careful about what they haven't shown. They measured the immediate effect, not what happens once drivers work out the freed-up route is quicker and pile back onto it, which is the standard way road improvements get eaten. Their penalty scheme was deliberately crude, so the ceiling on the approach is unknown. And the underlying Google Maps data is commercially confidential, so nobody outside can check the numbers. The finding sitting underneath all this is that a private company's routing algorithm has become a piece of transport infrastructure, tunable in the way a traffic light or a congestion charge is tunable. The obvious follow-up experiments are the ones a city government would want to run, not the ones a mapping company would. link to full article: nature.com/articles/s44284-0…

Courage really isn't the issue here. It takes courage to jump off a cliff. That doesn't mean that anybody should. There is no peaceful democratic route to achieve independence other than through a process agreed with UK gov. Any strategy which seeks to bypass that is not serious.

Edinburgh nimbys strike again. To me, it seems idiotic to object to an old trainline being used as a tramline.

Sevilla FC was founded by a Scot, by its first president, Edward Farquharson Johnston from Elgin.

just @BBCScotlandNews grandee jardine dismissing expert-led remediation, not stating his less-woke risk threshold nor what a mayor could do that labour council leader jane meagher hasn’t. while promoting scotlab policy. sure, it’s frustrating, but c’mon, this is reductive drivel.

nice thread👏

notion is the perfect example of feature creep it started as a notes app now nobody can explain what it actually is

“[You need] a happy narrative [for the common good] that would inspire young people. Like the Artemis going to the moon – it doesn’t have to be space, but really ambitious missions make people dream. They’re all looking up at the sky.” theguardian.com/environment/…

Who is Anas Sarwar going to blame now?

Fascinating that Starmer is widely regarded as doomed when so many key metrics are going his way: channel crossings, migration more generally, NHS waiting lists, and today’s inflation numbers

Turn on the TV for the World Cup build up. ITV have an in depth analysis of 1966 and what England need to do to win it again. I never knew England had ever won the World Cup. Those sly dogs. They kept that quiet! 😜

The vibes in New York rn